I don't often disagree with Thomas Sowell, but I'm skeptical of his proposal today for how to get better lawmakers into Congress.

You are not going to get the most highly skilled or intelligent people in the country, people with real-world experience, while offering them one-tenth or less of what such people can earn in the private sector.

A professor of economics at a leading university earns more than a member of Congress or a justice of the Supreme Court -- and a surgeon earns at least twice as much as an economics professor, though still only about a tenth of what a successful corporate executive can make.

How many people in the top layer of their respective professions are going to sacrifice the future of their families -- the ability to give their children the best education, the ability to have something to fall back on in case of illness or tragedy, the ability to retire in comfort and with peace of mind -- in order to go into politics?

He then proposes to pay them a million dollars a year. Does he really think that we'd get a better quality of candidate by offering more money? They'd become even more desperate to get elected. And so they'd engage in more pork-barrell spending to buy votes with the taxpayer's money. They'd demagogue even more and be more likely to resist any controversial plan to fix long term problems such as health care or Social Security. I'd prefer to see an end to political gerrymandering and new rules in the legislature that would get rid of such oddities as earmarks and the blocks that one senator can put on a nomination. There is no one magic bean that will clean up Congress, but I'd take an axe to a lot of the rules that lets these guys maneuver themselves into prominence rather than increase the pay and hope that would convince some great person to put up with all the ugliness that goes with politics.

I do, however, like his idea of rotation in office that would require people to serve a term and then get out for a term before they could go back into public service. Let them experience the real world for a while.

What term limits need to do is make it nearly impossible to spend a whole career in politics. One term per office and some period of years outside of politics before running again would be a good principle.

Many people today marvel when looking back at the leaders who created the United States of America. Most of the founders of this country had day jobs for years. They were not career politicians.

George Washington, who took pride in his self-control, lost his temper completely when someone told him that a decision he was going to make could cost him re-election as President. He blew up at the suggestion that he wanted to be President, rather than serving as a duty when he would rather be back home.

Power is such a dangerous thing that ideally it should be wielded by people who don't want to use power, who would rather be doing something else, but who are willing to serve a certain number of years as a one-time duty, preferably at the end of a career doing something else.

What about all the experience we would lose? Most of that is experience in creating appearances, posturing, rhetoric, and spin -- in a word, deception. We need leaders with experience in the real world, not experience in the phony world of politics.

Of course, if these people would be truly serving as a one-time duty, they wouldn't need the million dollar salary. Can you imagine what our Founding Fathers would have thought of the idea that we need to bribe our legislators with money in order to get some quality people to serve? And for every example of a George Washington who got out of public office as soon as he could, there are many counter examples of those who served in some capacity most of their lives. James Madison, for example